Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research

2014 Edition
| Editors: Alex C. Michalos

Collectivism

  • Michael Minkov
Reference work entry
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_438

Synonyms

Description

More than a decade ago, Smith, Dugan and Trompenaars (1996) stated that the individualism-collectivism dimension was “the most important yield of cross-cultural psychology to date” (p. 237). Since 1980, this construct has become extremely popular in the cross-cultural literature, and at least 1,400 articles have been published on the subject (Gelfand, Bhawuk, Nishii, & Bechtold, 2004). However, their authors have applied the term individualism-collectivism to a wide range of diverse phenomena, creating significant confusion.

The fascination with the individualism-collectivism dimension started after Hofstede’s (1980) work. He used nations as units of analysis and proposed a bipolar dimension of national culture that was strongly correlated with national wealth. The rich nations emerged at one of the dimension’s poles (individualism), whereas the poorest nations were at the opposite pole (collectivism). Hofstede interpreted this dimension as a...

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References

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Michael Minkov
    • 1
  1. 1.International UniversitySofiaBulgaria